


The Devil Went Down to Palo Alto

by shinobi93



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst, Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinobi93/pseuds/shinobi93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, how Eduardo's life took a ridiculous turn he could never have expected.</p>
<p>“I beat the devil in a coding match. And now he’s going to come and take you away. To Hell.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil Went Down to Palo Alto

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much crack fic based upon the song 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia', but with a bit of angst because, well, this is TSN. It started as 200 words I posted on Tumblr over the summer and became this in a haze over the last few days. Thanks to alichay for being around to keep the TSN feels going so that I could write this.
> 
> Apologies for any factual errors, but 1) I don't know anything about internet companies and 2) it has Satan in it, how realistic do you want it to be?

“Wardo,” the voice choked down the line, a sound Eduardo hadn’t heard in over a year. The rough, panicked breathing resonated against his ear as he paused, silent, shocked. It was 3am and Mark had just rung him, on the hotel phone which nobody knew the number for but of course Mark could find it, because he was Mark. “Wardo,” the voice repeated, insistently.

“Are...are you drunk?” he asked, uncertainly. Surely it was too late for drunken phone calls, years too late.

“No, Wardo...please...I’ve done...I’ve-” Mark was tripping over his words, urgent, so frantic that he hadn’t seemed to have noticed what he was calling his former best friend. Eduardo stayed quiet whilst he hyperventilated on the other end. Finally, he got his words out. “I’ve done something stupid.”

Why couldn’t you have said that all those years ago? flashed through Eduardo’s mind, but he remained silent, unsure why he was the recipient of this call. He stared at the blank wall of his anonymous hotel room, wondering if this was a dream, one of the ones he’d been plagued with for months and months, always waking up feverish and breathing heavily, casting his eyes around for proof that Mark might actually be there this time.

“Wardo,” Mark repeated, and Eduardo willed him to stop calling him that, nothing was bad enough to warrant him using it again without warning. “I beat the devil in a coding match. And now he’s going to come and take you away. To Hell.”

-

_Mark walked back to his desk, sat down and put his head in his hands. Fuck, he hated this. Having to sit there in a room with his former best friend - which in itself was far too reminiscent of the last time they’d done that, those damn depositions - when nobody knew why he’d even bothered coming to the meeting rather than making some excuse for his absence (was awkwardness an official reason to send your apologies, Mark wondered). His brain was always running out of the room, darting round the building searching for new ideas and better improvements, looking for solutions to problems that hadn’t occurred yet. Not every problem. Some he wasn’t so good at._

_Finally, when the meeting had ended, he’d scurried off. People would assume he was busy. He was, he was always busy, but that wasn’t it. Eduardo Saverin. That sounded so formal. Echoes of Sy and Gretchen’s voices ran through his mind. Mr Saverin. Even then, Mark had wanted to protest that that wasn’t his name._

_Wardo._

_Names held power. His name, with its short staccato sound, was made to be called, shouted, berated when he was too involved in something else to pay attention. You could lengthen the ‘a’, but whatever happened, you had to end on that sharp ‘k’. Wardo, you could keep on going forever with those vowels. Dustin had, back at Harvard, sometimes managing to make the ‘o’ sound long enough to be its own word in itself._

_Mark lifted up his head and peered at his laptop. He started typing, staring at the lines of code in the hope that they’d erase the picture in his head. That face that he was torn between wanting to see every day and wanting to never see again. The former would always win in the end, but it was too late. Dustin and Chris occasionally insisted otherwise, but they were pretending, playing an act in the hope of preventing a major Mark Zuckerberg breakdown. Nobody else would realise, but they knew him well. They’d seen what him and Wardo had been like, before._

_The name again. Seeing him had done that. Brought the familiarity back to the surface. Mark typed faster._

_Voices. He kept them tuned out, the picture refusing to fade. That look, so serious, so unlike the easy smile he had been greeted with innumerably in the past. The way that Eduardo had kept his head down, both literally and figuratively, as the meeting swelled around him. Mark, renowned for his lack of concentration in meetings, had at points gazed at the other guy, willing him to not look up._

_He kept typing, rewriting tiny bits of code that no one else would bother with, trying to make Facebook the best that it could be. That was all he aimed for. He muttered under his breath, a streaming monologue of computing and Wardo and the memories he was trying to suppress, but didn’t move from the chair. Wired in on a one-way trip to coding oblivion._

_This was the first meeting Eduardo had attended, although it was now years since that anti-meeting, the point when everything was so irreparably damaged that Wardo had smashed the laptop. Shards of their friendship scattered on the floor. Mark fucking hated the symbolism, but you couldn’t deny it was there._

_In the time since then, he’d channelled all his focus on his work, his project, the thing that kept him going throughout everything. Connecting other people so he didn’t have to be connected any more. Dustin had tried valiantly (“but it’s Wardo man, there’s gotta be something you can do”), still it was no use. He’d tried and failed to cut the infected memories away. They’d become more distant, but maybe that was worse: slowly slipping away from him, both the bad and the good._

_Then today had happened._

_Was it still today? Mark doubted it, but he was too busy to look at the time, move his vision that fraction of an inch to check. Coding like he was rewriting the underlying structure of his brain to remove the problem. Start from the bottom and work up. What was the issue? Wardo. Not him, per se, but the fact that he had a ghostly twin living in Mark’s head which had just been awoken. One that was now nagging him to stop, to eat and sleep and do all the things that Wardo used to tell him to do, back at Harvard, back then. No, it_ was _him, it was him being back and real and not just a memory trapped in the past. Living and breathing and existing past Mark’s memories of him._

_“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered, the words slipping from his lips and into his quiet office. “Fucking Wardo.” He didn’t mean that. He was angry at himself, for getting so worked up about this. He was angry at both of them for being such idiots._

_A loud bang in the room made Mark jump literally out of his seat. This was his office, his personal office, where had the noise even come from? He span round on the chair, expecting a surprise but not that big of a surprise._

_“Hello Mark.”_

_In front of him, standing about six feet tall, was a red figure in a black suit, with red horns and a spiked tail. Satan. The devil had just appeared in his office. Mark wondered if Wardo was no longer the biggest issue of the day._

-

Eduardo didn’t know what to say. He gulped air, wondering if this was some elaborate prank, but that didn’t exact fit with his and Mark’s history. The dark hotel room offered him no answers. Blank, ambiguous.

“Wardo, say something,” urged Mark desperately.

“I…” he stuttered, stumbling over the simplest of words.

“Get over here.” There was a pause. Eduardo still didn’t speak. Mark seemed to have worked out the time. “Wait, no, I’ll come to you.”

That didn’t happen often, or it hadn’t. Now it was bordering on utterly impossible. Mark wasn’t just panicking, Mark was worried enough to make the compromise and come to him. Maybe not a prank then, but how could it be anything else? That was a song, not a thing that happened in real life. The devil didn’t just turn up places; that was ridiculous. Then again, he’d thought the same thing on that day, standing in the Facebook offices with Sean Parker’s smug face in front of him. It was ridiculous.

He made some noise down the phone, possibly assent (but it made no difference as Mark hadn’t asked a question), and ended the call. His mind was reeling. He was torn between believing that Mark was hallucinating and panicking that he was telling the truth. Which would be easier? It was hard to tell. Both options were about to end up with him and Mark in the same room, tempered by the presence of nobody but some anonymous furniture.

A knock at the door. Behind it, looking like he might have sprinted the four blocks to the hotel, was Eduardo’s old best friend, his eyes wide and his breathing heavy. Eduardo stepped back, letting Mark in. Back in his life that simply. All it took was the fucking devil.

“Please,” pleaded Mark, tripping and leaning against the bed. “Listen to me. He’s coming. He’s coming and there’s nothing. Nothing I can do.”

“What happened?” Eduardo whispered, finally remembering how to speak. He stayed standing, too anxious to sit. Ready to defend or run or whatever the occasion called for. The room looked solemn, as he switched a bedside lamp on but nothing else: a vigil for what they’d lost.

“I was coding.” Even after all this time, he read the message implicit in that statement: Mark had been blocking out the world after the meeting. Maybe because Mark found corporate stuff so boring. Maybe being of his presence at the meeting. “In my office. Nothing unusual. Then there’s a noise and all of a sudden he’s there. Satan.”

Eduardo stared. Hearing it in person didn’t make it seem any less ridiculous. Mark looked exhausted, having pulled himself up onto sitting on the bed, but that wasn’t a sign that something terrible had happened: most of his memories of Mark were of him having some level of sleep deprivation.

“Satan.”

“Yes, the devil, whatever you want to call him, he was there. And he started taunting me.”

“As the devil would,” Eduardo interrupted.

“Yeah, and then he said something about being behind on his quota of souls and being willing to make a deal. A coding match and the winner takes all. He’d get my soul or I’d get some kind of brilliant prize.”

“Not a fiddle of gold? Or a laptop of gold, in your case.”

“What?” Mark looked nonplussed.

“The song? You know, some guy has a fiddle match with the devil.” He had no idea where he knew that song from. Mark was looking at him, panic put on hold for confusion just for a second. Eduardo didn’t know what had happened to his brain, pointing out trivial references when there was apparently a prince of Hell after him. Still, they hadn’t gotten to that bit of the tale.

“I wasn’t bothered about the prize. It was Satan, Wardo, I could actually beat him. Beat the devil. You can’t get better than that.” Stop using the name, he willed, but Mark didn’t seem to be consciously doing it. Probably a consequence of the panic. Revert back to the past.

“So you said yes? ‘That sounds great Satan, thanks’. Do you ever think before you agree to things?” Uh oh, Eduardo realised, this is going down the wrong path.

“Of course I do.” Closed off that topic. Mark didn’t elaborate on his decision, but what else could Eduardo expect now. Reading Mark had gotten that bit harder, the changes had rendered his once-great Mark sense more obsolete. In need of an upgrade.

“What happened then?” he prompted, because Mark had stopped talking and was staring at him with wide eyes, his brain clearly calculating a bunch of stuff that he didn’t feel the need to share.

“I beat him.”

“How?” It had to be asked. How on earth did somebody beat the devil at anything? Eduardo was having a difficult time reconciling himself to the fact that Satan apparently existed, but he could still appreciate the immense scale of that concept. Prince of Hell. Ruler of evil. Apparently fallible. 

“By being better than him.” Despite his panic, Mark rolled his eyes. Eduardo wasn’t sure if that was due to him or Satan. “He wasn’t as great as you’d expect. Bit slow.”

“So, you won. And he didn’t uphold his side of the deal? Oh, I wonder why not…” The sarcasm dripped from his voice. Deals weren’t binding. Not in this world and not in Hell. Mark stood up suddenly, swaying slightly as if he hadn’t expected his body to do that.

“He changed the deal, Wardo,” shouted Mark, his voice strained. “Said he’d drag you down to Hell instead.” He whispered the next words, like a confession. “Said you’d be more fun to break.”

Mark was shaking, the manic glint in his eyes not the old one that meant he’d had a brilliant idea, but a new fear. Eduardo was caught between the desire to step closer to him, to try and offer some sort of comfort (what comfort could you even offer in that situation?), and the unerring knowledge of their past, what Mark had done.

Seeing Eduardo’s inactivity, Mark continued to talk. “He’s going to come. Said he’d give me a head start, that’s it.”

“Why would Satan give you anything?” Eduardo wondered, more to himself than Mark. Then, realizing the obvious question, he looked directly into Mark’s eyes, fixing the other guy in his gaze. “Why is he taking me?”

“What?”

“Why me? We haven’t spoken in years. Did he think he was doing you a favor? Get rid of the old friend, neaten up everything into tidy columns?”

“No!” shouted Mark, stepping slightly towards Eduardo. “He-...no, I…” A pause.

At that exact moment, which the two of them caught in a tableau all too similar to their previous arguments, desperation emanating from them in waves, there was a sudden crash and right there in the stupid hotel room that he’d booked for the stupid meeting, there was the devil. Dry ice seemed to be rising from his blistered, leathery red skin and he was wearing nothing but expensive suit pants. Eduardo gaped.

“Sorry about that, we’re big on theatricality down in Hell. Can’t get rid of the fucking dry ice, whatever I do. Smoke was better, but it started causing issues with fire alarms so I couldn’t just materialize wherever I wanted, not without evacuating the building of people I wanted to condemn to eternal damnation.” Satan stopped and looked at them. Eduardo was breathing so fast he could barely believe it and had unconsciously moved closer to Mark. Out of the two options, Mark was infinitely preferable.

“Oh, were you in the middle of something? It’s the modern world, full of interruptions. Instant communication.” He looked at Mark, and winked. “Thanks for that, Zuckerberg. Did me a bunch of favors. All those people invading others’ privacy, mocking them on the internet, bullying them...it’s wonderful.”

Eduardo was trapped in a mixture of fear and disbelief. The devil was surprisingly chatty, but at the same time, was apparently here to take him away to Hell. For some reason. He was a bit scared of asking Mark again, actually, because he was starting to get the feeling that it might be more important that a simple ‘the devil is unpredictable’. Mark, however, was more used to Satan and responded quickly.

“If you’re so appreciative of what I’ve done, why are you doing this?”

“Oh Marky Mark,” the devil drawled, pointing a finger at him. “For a genius you’re so blind. Why did you think you could trust me to keep my word? I am, after all, the devil. It took millennia to build up that reputation.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Mark, but Eduardo could see the lack of conviction in his eyes.

“It’s not, and you know it. You understand the logic. To stay at the top, you have to make sacrifices, don’t you Mark? A bit of deceit, it goes a long way.”

“Not...not any more. You can’t bring that up. If you wanted to make me look stupid, you’ve have beaten me in the first place.”

“But you were just too good for little old me. Everyone’s got their past mistakes, Mark, I’m just making you face up to yours. Call it a service.”

“But it’s over, it was years ago, I’ve changed.”

“Really? Is that why you were so unable to handle one little meeting that you retreated into your beloved world of code until you were crazy enough to say ‘yes’ to the devil? You weren’t proving yourself. You know you’re the best. You were proving that you hadn’t been beaten by seeing your precious Wardo again.”

Mark didn’t answer. What, Eduardo thought, seriously, what the hell? How was this about him, about what had happened when they were young idiots, certain that they were each right? He’d thought this was all about Mark’s ego and his skill at annoying people just by being himself. Leaving Eduardo to sort out the pieces: that was what it’d been like at Harvard, the one friend that he couldn’t scare off sweeping away the messes and keeping an eye on him. People had sometimes remarked, believing themselves out of his earshot, about why Eduardo would ever put up with him. Nobody saw that Mark was his friend, that he knew Eduardo and what made him tick, even if it was caught up in that brain of his in amongst the programming and the ideas, only occasionally tumbling to the surface for long enough for this knowledge to be proven to exist. It was there and that had been enough.

Still, nobody spoke. Not even Satan. He was waiting for something, but Eduardo didn’t know what. He opened his dry mouth and willed words to come out.

“Why me?” The devil smirked.

“Oh no, you’re not getting that answer out of me. Mark knows. He might be denying it, but he does. Same as he knows how to find out which hotel you’re at and why you came to this meeting, the first one you’ve deigned to grace with your presence. He’s clever, you know.”

“I know,” Eduardo muttered at the same time that Mark said “I don’t know why he came.”

Satan laughed, an unnerving sound that chilled Eduardo to the bone despite the warm room. “Yes, you do. Same reason your heart jumps slightly whenever you encounter his name, if you’ll pardon the stereotypical imagery. It’s been a long time. Long enough.”

No, Eduardo’s brain was telling him, that’s not why you went, you went because it was a suitable time on your schedule, not too busy, and you ought to make an appearance at one of the meetings at least. It would be irresponsible not to. He was a co-founder of Facebook, regardless of anything else.

“Come on pretty boy, don’t be lying to yourself now,” the devil said to him, smirking again at his shock. Satan could read minds? “Of course I can read minds, idiot.”

Suddenly, a scorched piece of paper appeared from nowhere in the air before the devil. He reached out a clawed hand and read something on other side.

“I’m afraid I’m needed elsewhere, so I’m going to have to wrap up our little chat pretty quickly. Now, I’m feeling all lenient, which probably means I need a good dose of torturing sinners, but that means I’ll give you two ill-fated buddies a choice: either, Mark explains to Wardo here why it was him that I said I’d drag down to Hell, or I’ll do exactly that. With fire and torture and everything: it’ll be a blast.”

Eduardo flinched at the devil’s use of the nickname, even though he definitely had bigger things to be worrying about. Things like whether Mark even knew the answer the devil wanted, or whether he’d care enough to actually reveal it. He’d seemed pretty reticent beforehand.

“I…” Mark looked agonized, unable to say the words necessary, searching for a loophole as the seconds counted down. “Can’t I promise to explain it to him and then you’ll go?”

“No. Not good enough. Tell him in the next thirty seconds or I’m taking his fancy suit clad ass down to Hell with me and offering him to the nastiest devils as a plaything.”

Eduardo gulped. The ultimatum didn’t sound good. He desperately wanted to trust that Mark would do the right thing, but he couldn’t take that leap of faith. Once, he would have. No question.

“Because…” Mark began. The moment was held in suspense: Mark, trying to look anywhere but at Eduardo, his lips quivering with potential words; Eduardo staring at him, eyes fixed on the face that was about to decide his fate and his heart hammering rapidly inside his chest; and lastly Satan, the onlooker, stretching out his wings as he prepared to disappear.

“Because I was thinking about you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It was driving me crazy and and then he appeared, all smug and knowing. And when he threatened to take you away, I knew. I couldn’t let him. I miss you, Wardo, way too much, and I couldn’t let him take you out of the world completely, not when there was any chance you might talk to me again.”

Mark gulped for air, as if the very effort of saying those words had broken him, but they’d broken Eduardo too. This time, the nickname hurt in a different way, hurt with the raw emotion of it all and the truth of it all. The truth that they’d always been too close to properly split apart. He’d read Mark’s blog at stupid hours of the night and spent longer in Mark’s dorm room than he could count. To have that all gone, it had been difficult. No, it had been near fucking impossible, but he’d done it, somehow, kept going, always missing the thing he wasn’t allowed to have. His best friend back.

Satan’s voice snapped him back to reality. “Are we done here, then? Yes? Now kiss and make up, whatever, and hopefully you’ve learnt your lesson: don’t make fucking deals with the devil. Oh, and Mark? Keep up the good work.” The devil disappeared, the lingering dry ice and scorch marks on the carpet the only clues that he’d been there at all.

Mark and Eduardo stood, frozen, gazing at each other in uncertainty. Eduardo had no idea if what had just happened, what Mark had admitted, made any difference. Would they go back to how they were? It pained him just to think that, but it was pretty likely. It would take so much work to get them back to how they were (or more, a voice in his head whispered persuasively, you were always teetering on the edge of that, weren’t you?).

“So,” he said tentatively.

“So,” Mark responded, like a parrot. Eduardo laughed uneasily.

“Did the devil just...try to make us reconcile?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “We probably should try. The guy seemed fairly no-nonsense.” Eduardo laughed again, then became serious.

“You should have told me.” He didn’t specify what. It wasn’t necessary. Everything.

“You should have listened.” 

“We can learn, right?”

“We’re the founders of Facebook, we can do anything.” And with that, the serious moment was gone, both of them smiling again, at each other. There would be more talking, the stuff they’d missed out years ago and paid the price, but for now that was a matter for the future. Things would take time, but that was fine. It was worth it.

Mark moved closer, fear back in his eyes. “I…” he tried to say again. Eduardo, interpreting Mark just like he used to, leaned forward and met his lips in a chaste kiss.

“That as well,” he promised. “We can try. This time.” Mark nodded, having used up almost all of the conversation they needed to have right then, but there was one last thing to say, again, but this time as an equivalent promise.

“Wardo.”


End file.
